Magic Johnston

Craig Johnston’s creative genius has helped him conjure up a life of incredible invention both on and off the pitch

There’s a sudden clap of thunder and Craig Johnston breaks off mid-sentence to look through the window. Rain is lashing down on the Sydney Harbour Bridge beneath our table high up in the Shangri-la Hotel. It’s utterly miserable. “That would make a great picture,” says Johnston,reaching instinctively for his enormous camera. Just as FourFourTwo is thinking: “Er, no it wouldn’t”, we see the lightning. It dramatically illuminates a biblical sky, glinting off the bridge and the Opera House. It would have made a great picture. “Where were we?” he asks, turning back.

We were mid-way through a pot of coffee and the story of Johnston’s life of Kipling-esque triumph and disaster. We’d spoken about how he went into hospital to have his leg amputated when he was five. We’d talked about how he was instantly dismissed as the worst player his manager had ever seen when Johnston first arrived in English football from Australia at the age of 15. We’d moved on to why Liverpool tried to sue him after he walked out of the club, leaving him penniless. But we hadn’t quite got on to the fortunes he’s made and lost as a designer and entrepreneurial inventor of such varied products as football boots, TV game shows and mini-bar fridges. You couldn’t make it up – unless, of course, you’re Craig Johnston. Because making things is his speciality.

How does a footballer end up being an inventor? “I was an inventor and then I was a footballer,” he says. “It just comes naturally. I’ve got a head for design; I love to see how things are made. As a kid I didn’t play with toys, I pulled them apart to see how they worked and then see if I could put them back together again.”

In that case, how does an inventor become a footballer? The answer to that question is more involved, and it starts with a fight Johnston had on his first day of school. During the scrap, a boil on Johnston’s leg burst and became infected. Within a week, the infection had become the polio-related condition osteomyelitis and the only way to stop it spreading was to amputate the rotting bone. “I had actually signed the forms to have his leg removed, it was that close,” his mother Dorothy tells me. “But by chance, an American surgeon called Dr Glass who was touring Australia at the time intervened and operated to save his leg.“

Did this episode catalyse the fantasia of single-minded determination that has overflowed in everything Johnston has done since, for better and occasionally for worse? “Absolutely,” he says. “I was in hospital for eight months. It was right on the beach so all I could see out of the corner of the window was the surf and kids running around. I was just like ‘let me out of here’. That’s why I have such a love of surf and why I have never stopped running around making a nuisance of myself since. Did you ever see me play football? I’d run around like a fucking lunatic. I made a career out of it. So definitely there was a psychological link to that, and there still is.”

His mother agrees. “Craig’s life began as a struggle and that is how it’s continued,” she says. “But he’s never given up, never stopped trying. I know that when he looks back on his life, he won’t have any regrets about not giving things a go, unlike his father. Craig has always said: ‘I’d hate to be like dad; not knowing how good I could have been.’”

Colin Johnston was 22 when he left Australia to trial with Dundee United. To his eternal disappointment, he’d left it too late and ended up as a mechanic. His son was not going to make the same mistake. Although Craig was a bright and diligent student, his parents took him out of school at the age of 15, much to the headmaster’s chagrin, and sent him to England.

“I’d written to all the clubs for him, asking for a trial,” recalls Dorothy. “Only Middlesbrough said yes – on the condition that we pay his way.” Colin was so confident his boy would make the grade, he put his house on it. Literally. “We didn’t have much money then so we had to move the family to a smaller place to finance the trip,” says Dorothy. “People thought we were mad. I guess we were young and silly ourselves.”

The gamble almost went very badly wrong. “When I got to Middlesbrough, the manager, Jack Charlton, said: ‘You, kangaroo, are the worst player I’ve ever seen in my life – now fuck off back home’,” remembers Johnston. “He wasn’t joking; he was very serious. But he wasn’t wrong either – I was crap. I burst into tears, ran home and rang my mum. She was very excited and asked: ‘How was your big trial with Jack Charlton?’ I said: ‘Mum, he told me I’m one of the finest footballers he’s ever seen and he wants me stay’, and I put the phone down before I cried again. I couldn’t go home a failure after they’d sold the house to finance my trip. So I thought: ‘What the fuck am I going to do now?’”

Johnston’s response was to do to the game of football what he had done to his childhood toys: he took it apart to see how it worked and then tried to put it all together himself. Without Charlton’s permission or knowledge, Johnston stayed in Middlesbrough. “I hid from him the whole time,” he says. “Jack only came in for training and then buggered off. I’d hide in the car park when he was around.”
Meanwhile, like football’s answer to Rocky Balboa, Johnston trained himself. “I dribbled the ball in between garbage cans, dribbled at pace between two tramlines a yard apart. If I touched the cans or the lines I’d have to start again. I would put on a blindfold and sense the football with my feet as I dribbled. I put crosses on the wall and hit them with my left foot and right foot. If I concentrated I’d get home early. I was training four, five, six hours extra a day totally on my own. Anyway, it works: if you spend that long with a football, eventually you get better.”

To continue the self-made theme, Johnston earned money cleaning the senior players’ boots, developing a feel for boot design that would later serve him well. He also managed to bribe a club official to go behind Charlton’s back and allow him to stay with the other apprentices. “Even back then I was finding ways around obstacles.”

Hardly surprising, then, that for all the glory days he would later have with Liverpool including scoring in the 1986 FA Cup final, his proudest moment in football remains the first time he played for Middlesbrough (under new manager John Neal). He was 17, the club’s youngest ever first-team debutant. “After the osteo, two and a half years in a car park, and all the knock-back and rejection, I could have died a happy man that day,” he says.

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Johnston is 47 now and looks it – thicker round the middle, his luxuriant grey hair swept back into a slightly tragic ponytail. In his heyday at Liverpool as a muscular speedster with his flowing corkscrew ringlets streaming behind him, ‘Skippy’ was a cult figure. Not least thanks to his penning the perfectly dreadful ‘Anfield Rap’ that he recites for me with great gusto. “I went to London and sought out a guy called Derek B who was Britain’s first ever rapper and said: ‘Look it’s a piss-take - let’s do it’. So I wrote the words and he got the Twist and Shout hook. I still get royalties from Virgin Records. It’s always a cheque for £1.27 or 87p.”

“Craig was a one-man hurricane: a really funny, energetic, whirlwind of a human with a super fast brain,” remembers Derek Boland. “When you’re are asked to go out for a drink with him, take a couple of days off after just in case, because you could end up in Hawaii or shark hunting or in Moscow trying a really good vodka he had once… Amazing energy level, brilliant guy.”

“Craig always had a 100 ideas every second so the law of averages says a few have to be good,” says his former captain Alan Hansen. “Making the Anfield Rap was hilarious, but it was also clever and innovative. No-one even knew what rap was in 1988. He was ahead of the game as usual and he made it happen. It was like everything he did, whether it was football or photography or music: once he put his mind to something, he did it wholeheartedly and very successfully.”

Two years later, Johnston collaborated with New Order, writing John Barnes’s rap in England’s Italia ‘90 song World in Motion. “All the England players were just getting pissed when we were doing the song,” says New Order’s Peter Hook. “I remember Paul Gascoigne necked three bottles of Champagne in 15 minutes. We’d tried out both him and Peter Beardsley for the rap but they were both awful. Then out of nowhere Craig came in and wrote this rap for John Barnes and it just worked. He saved the day. I thought he was an England player. You’re telling me now he’s Australian!? It ended up being the best football song ever written. Every time I put it on when I DJ, people go mad for it.”

“Craig was just a great character, one of the funniest people I’ve ever met,” continues Hansen. “I remember how on the bus back from Wembley after we lost to Wimbledon [in the 1988 FA Cup Final], everyone was so low. But he had the whole bus in stitches for about five hours with his stories and jokes and accents. He should have been a stand-up comedian.”

So popular was Johnston, he was voted 59th in a recent official club poll of the Top 100 Players That Shook the Kop. Not bad for a player who, by his own admission, wasn’t terribly good. “I was the worst player in the world's best team, but the Liverpool fans warmed to me because I always gave 100%. Few players have ever tried harder.” He pronounces the word “Liverpeel” with an unaffected Scouse lilt.

“He’s being a bit hard on himself there,” says Hansen. “He was definitely the fittest player I have ever seen in my life and he had a lot of flair. He maybe didn’t reach the very highest level but he was a major part of that great Liverpool side.”

One England B cap aside, Johnston never got to play international football. He once flippantly commented that “playing football for Australia is the equivalent of surfing for England” and has never been allowed to forget it back home. But his success – five league championships, three league cups, one FA Cup and one European Cup in seven years with Liverpool – did a great deal to advance the game Down Under. Before Johnston, football was a game for “sheilas, wogs and poofters”, to quote the title of a famous book about Australian soccer. “Without a doubt, Craig’s success really helped promote football and paved the way for the current generation of Socceroos,” says Australia and Everton’s Tim Cahill. “He’s an absolute legend who inspired me and gave me the confidence to go to England. He may never have played for Australia but he was always representing Australia. I truly believe he put Australian football on the map."

And then it was all over. Johnston shocked the Kop when he suddenly walked out in 1988. “He shocked us too,” says Hansen. “You just didn’t walk out of a club like Liverpool at that time. We thought he was mad, but we didn’t know the real reason then. He kept that to himself.”

“The story of why I left has never been told properly,” Johnston says sternly. Earlier that year, his younger sister, Faye, nearly died in a gassing accident caused by a faulty heater in her Moroccan hotel room. Johnston hired an air ambulance to bring her back to the UK and flew his parents over. When it became clear that Faye would need round-the-clock care back home in Australia, Johnston decided to help provide it. Though she came out of her coma, Faye has sadly never recovered. In retrospect, does he now regret his decision to quit the game? “My best football was to come which is something of a regret,” he says, “but we were only thinking about Faye then.” Just as his arrival in England was precipitated by family sacrifice, so was his departure.

Unfortunately, that departure turned sour after The Sun reported Johnston had walked out and claimed he was secretly seeking a transfer. “I felt let down as the story appeared in the paper before he had told me or anyone at the club what he had decided to do,” recalls his then manager Kenny Dalglish.

“I remember phoning Kenny to explain from the hospital,” says Dorothy. “It was complicated because my other daughter was eight months’ pregnant back home and we didn’t want her to find out in case it harmed the baby, so we had to keep the story really hush-hush.”

Nevertheless, Liverpool froze Johnston’s assets while they considered taking him to court for breach of contract, leaving him with no money and no option but start from scratch. Like the 15-year-old burdened with his father’s mortgage, he couldn’t afford to fail.

Despite the threat of legal action, Johnston returned to Anfield within the year, having raised A$100,000 (£40,000) for the families of the 96 Liverpool fans who died in the Hillsbrough disaster. “A lot of the injuries from the crushing caused brain damage through lack of oxygen which is what happened to Faye in her gassing accident, so I could empathise,” says Johnston. While he was back, the club apologised, dropped their court case and even, he claims, offered him a new deal. “I don’t recall him being offered a contract when he came back to help,” says Dalglish, “but his presence was very welcome.”

By then, Johnston had begun to work in TV in Sydney, first producing short sports items for Channel 9, and then as the unlikely creator of a prime-time family game show called The Main Event that was syndicated around the world and made him his first fortune.

He made his second fortune from the Predator – a revolutionary football boot that gave wearers extra swerve and control of the ball due to patches of toothed rubber. All those hours earning a pittance as the Middlesbrough boot boy had eventually paid off pretty well. “I was responsible for cleaning, polishing and maintaining all the boots every day at Boro and I studied them,” he says. “I wore all the different boots when the pros weren’t looking so I got an overview of all the styles, their comfort and performance, how they affected how you felt. Some were good, some were bad, and I could tell the difference. I developed an expertise.”

“The development of the Predator was a long hard slog over three or four years but ultimately it helped save and revive the entire adidas brand,” recalls Simon Skirrow, former global head of adidas football. The company was in severe financial jeopardy at the time. The Predator soon became – and still remains – the world’s best-selling range, worn by such dead-ball specialists as David Beckham and Jonny Wilkinson, the architect of England’s 2003 rugby World Cup final victory over Australia. "Damn him! The bastard!" says Johnston with proper Aussie pride.

“Craig is a creative genius, a maverick,” continues Skirrow. “There were lots of people at adidas who doubted the validity of the whole project but in the end the Predator was the single biggest innovation and advancement in sports footwear in decades. He was way ahead of his time and he had this totally fresh mindset…” But? “But he was also maddening at times. We had some blazing rows where we ended up throwing the boots at each other.” Eventually Skirrow had enough and left. The pair haven’t spoken since. Johnston subsequently fell out with adidas in a big way. Adidas declined to be interviewed for this article and Johnston’s strongly-worded comments on the matter were made off the record.

“Craig would call me at 2 or 3am with ideas; he could never let go,” says Skirrow. “And he was also involved in too many other projects at the same time. I think maybe he over-challenges himself.” Or as Johnston’s mother puts it: “He’s always bitten off more than he can chew – and so he ends up having to chew like mad.”

Amongst these other projects was the emergence of a spiky new boot, The Pig, which in 1994 earned Johnston a place on the shortlist for the British Design Museum's prestigious Designer of the Year prize. The Pig was also available as a more affordable rubber galosh-style attachment. Or, as the curator of the Design Museum said with a perfectly straight face: "a £20 strap-on".

As with his football career, Johnston has not had everything his own way. Commercially speaking, he’s not managed to get The Pig to fly so far, and his ingenious, if annoying, redesign of the standard hotel mini-bar has also gone cold. He hoped ‘The Butler’ system – sensors that automatically charge anything removed from the fridge to the guest’s account – would take off globally, but only 30,000 have been sold.

“Craig is very intelligent but he’s not a businessman,” says his mum. “He hasn’t got a business bone in his body. He could have been a very rich man but he’s too much of an idealist.”

Johnston has made a lot of money, but he’s also lost a great deal – particularly with his most recent project, Supaskills, a coaching programme that he first formulated and tested on himself back in that Middlesbrough car park. “It is very simple,” he explains. “By using set parameters you can turn the 10 basic skills of the game from skills into scores into statistics. Once you have your score you can compare yourself to the pros as well as constantly trying to beat your own score. That’s how you get better skills.”

The idea has been endorsed by Uefa president Michel Platini and Fifa president Sepp Blatter amongst a great many others. Premier League chairman Sir Dave Richards liked the idea so much, he wanted to roll it out in every school in the UK. “It’s an absolutely brilliant concept that could revolutionise grass roots football in this country,” he says. “But the reason it did not take off is partly down to Craig himself. He’s an inventor but he can’t carry his inventions off because he hasn’t got good business sense. All he needs is a good business partner he can trust to look after that side of things for him.”

Johnston himself blames Supaskills’ failure on what he calls the “incompetence and gamesmanship” of the FA – particularly the then technical director “Howard fucking Wilkinson” with whom he almost came to blows. Both the FA and Wilkinson refused to contribute to this article to explain why they blocked the scheme.

The programme’s collapse cost Johnston a great deal – £1.5m – bankrupting him both financially and emotionally and contributed to his divorce. “I lost most of what I had, but when you’re a pioneer you usually end up with arrows in your back,” he says. “It tires you; you get a bit jaded and cynical with the whole thing. It upset me so much, I’ve left the UK and totally walked away from football from the time being. But I still believe it’s such a strong concept that it will be a great success one day.”

So having once more lost his winnings, Johnston has started again at his beginnings, returning to his first love that he originally took to as a 15-year-old on £8-a-week and that has developed ever since. In the last year, the inventor has reinvented himself as a professional photographer, shooting the likes of Tiger Woods for a high profile Tag Heuer campaign.

“He’s really talented,” says gallery owner Curt Littlecott, who held an exhibition of Johnston’s work last year. “Wherever he goes, his camera is around his neck. He’s been involved in many different projects, but photography is the constant in Craig's life and the thing that he is the most passionate about.”

Johnston took most of the pictures that accompany this article. “It’s what I’ve always wanted to do and I absolutely love it,” he smiles, sizing up the Harbour Bridge once more. “There’s a silver lining to any storm cloud. You just need to have an eye for knowing where and when to find it.”